600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 3,300 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 6 years to get that many views.

In the past few years, I have needed to create digital identities for a variety of entities–projects, clients, groups, etc. Each time I set up the digital footprint for these entities I’ve gotten smarter about the sequence of steps.

Below is a list of initial steps to take when creating the digital footprint of an entity. These services are all FREE so it’s affordable for a bootstrap situation or a well-funded business.

Establish Consistent Brand: Brainstorm name ideas or brand variations. Check yor top selections on NameChk.com. This service magically checks all the major, second level and minor level social media outlets (159 at last count) to see if a specific “handle” is available. You can also download the results into a spreadsheet and use it to maintain a list of site registrations and log in credentials.

Create A Master Hub: Create a Gmail account with the user name that cleared the brand hurdle above. The free services offered in Google are astounding starting with their web browser Chrome. My other favorites are Google+, Google Alerts, YouTube, Blogger and AdWords/Analytics.Hot Tip: When you initiate your Google AdWords account it will issue a Google Analytics code [UA-xxxxxxxx-1] from within that service. When you build your blog-based website you can embed this code for tracking customers from search to purchase using Analytics.

Get On The Majors: Using your gmail account or GoogleID establish identities on all the major networks and companion services: Twitter/Tweetdeck, Facebook, LinkedIn/SlideShare, Pinterest, Tumblr, WordPress, etc. The advantage of using Google ID is that as long as you are logged into your gmail account (especially when using Chrome) the other services will recognize you instantly.Hot Tip: Every single network and service contains getting started tutorials–use them! You can frequently sign up for a getting started email series.

I have become aware of many of these services by attending free webinars–usually under the heading of search marketing, but also competitive intelligence gathering.

Like this:

This past weekend one of the three wise dames celebrated an actual birthday (thanks to Cheryl, Laurel and Stanley for joining us). We won’t tell you who and we won’t tell you how old; however we decided that we would share our stats from our first year of blogging.

Thanks to everyone that followed along and supported us. We welcome your comments, so please post here. We’ve got fun things planned for 2011 so we hope you will tell your friends to subscribe.

In 2010, there were 35 new posts, not bad for the first year! The busiest day of the year was April 28th with 63 views.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,800 times in 2010. That’s about 9 full 747s.